


Iteration

by pvwork



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: First Kiss, Happy Ending, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-season 7, Quintessence Magic, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 02:09:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15741990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pvwork/pseuds/pvwork
Summary: “How’d you know?” Shiro asks.“I forgot who I am, Shiro. I still rememberyou,” Keith says, “And so does my vambrace.”Keith makes a gesture and a bright holographic reminder of a time, location, and task jumps up between them, a mirage of a past life hovering in the air for a moment before Keith dispels it with a wave of his hand.Keith temporarily loses his memories of himself. Shiro struggles with his own feelings.





	Iteration

**Author's Note:**

> "...if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known."
> 
> Tim Krieder 
> 
> "You're my end and my beginning / Even when I lose, I'm winning" 
> 
> _All of Me_ , John Legend

Shiro stands in front of the mirror in the en suite bathroom staring at the clippers in his hand hoping that they’ll come alive and talk him through this.

It’s time for his bi-weekly trim to keep his hair comfortably short and his edges clean, but it’s been so long since Shiro has had to do it himself. Matt used to help him out, but now Shiro is reluctant to bother him with something so trivial. Matt is out there running diagnostics on the Atlas and building new weapons to help defend Earth and hanging out with his new significant other. Shiro’s concerns about his hair seem trivial in comparison, and yet, some feelings keeps him in the bathroom, stays his hands as he goes to put the clippers down. His reflection refuses to meet his eye.

In many ways, routine is all he has. He has become a creature of habit to make himself feel more human, and he’s loathe to break free of this exoskeleton of humanity he has built so painstakingly around himself.

The biometric lock pad on his door chimes as his door slides open, and Shiro turns slowly when he hears steps coming closer and closer to the door of the bathroom.

“How’d you know?” Shiro asks.

“I forgot who I am, Shiro. I still remember _you_ ,” Keith says, “And so does my vambrace.”

Keith makes a gesture and a bright holographic reminder of a time, location, and task jumps up between them, a mirage of a past life hovering in the air for a moment before Keith dispels it with a wave of his hand.

“You don’t have to,” Shiro says.

“I want to do this for you.”

Shiro bites his lip. “You’re not yourself. You really don’t have to.”

Shiro’s half hearted protests is met with a derisive snort. Keith gestures for the clippers. “It doesn’t take a personality to cut hair, Shiro. Let me do this for you. You can trust me not to mess up.”

He hands over the clippers.

It’s not that he’s worried about Keith somehow messing up his hair, which is really the least of his worries at this point. He trusts Keith; God help him. A small part of him points out very loudly that he would trust any and every iteration of Keith, which is a weird observation to make when one said iteration of the man is holding a buzzing razor to the back of Shiro’s neck.

Shiro watches Keith’s face in the mirror. It’s hard not to. His lips are pursed in concentration, but the rest of his face is relaxed. His eyes are the kind of focussed that Shiro usually associates with sparring and flying, but it’s also the same expression Keith has always made when he’s cut Shiro’s hair in the past. It’s not a chore to pretend this is just another alternating Sunday and Keith is doing Shiro another favor that Shiro doesn’t know how to repay, which Keith will not allow him to repay.

* * *

 

It had all started when Atlas landed beside Voltron after they had defeated the mysterious Galran mecha. It had been a difficult fight, but Shiro had felt energized and strangely calm as he requested Veronica to hail Voltron.

“Voltron, this is Atlas. Status update. Over”

Seconds had passed before Pidge’s voice had filtered into the control room.

“Wait out.”

That had been the first indication something was wrong, but Shiro had foolishly held onto hope in that initial silence.

* * *

 

Keith’s hands are steady and sure as he works. The sensation of the clippers against his head, the low grade buzz of it, seems to trickle down Shiro’s spine like lava. Keith guides him gentle touches to the back of his neck, and Shiro tries to ignore the flash of heat each press of Keith’s fingers to his skin brings. It’s nothing, he reminds himself, just like he has for every Sunday in recent memory.

Carefully, Keith steps around Shiro. He sits up on the bathroom counter and positions Shiro to stand between his knees.

“Relax,” Keith says, and presses down on Shiro’s shoulders. Shiro takes a deep breath and on the exhale, closes his eyes and tells himself very firmly that this is nothing to get flustered over. “Better,” Keith says, and he rewards Shiro with a small smile.

This time the tension sits in Shiro’s chest, like his heart is now two sizes too large for his ribs to protect fully. He feels vulnerable and exposed, even though he’s only been standing here for a few minutes at best with Keith’s hands on him. He hopes that his emotions aren’t shining through his eyes and beaming straight into Keith’s brain by way of some eye-contact based telepathy, because Shiro finds that he can’t look away. Keith’s eyes are a warm brown with gold flecks at the outer edges of his irises. Shiro has never been close enough to get a good look, but now he is. He’s so close.

* * *

 

“Houston,” Pidge had said over the comms, breaking hailing protocol, “we have a problem.”

Keith landed Black gently amongst the dust and rubble of what had once been the Garrison’s landing strip.

“Shiro, who am I?” Keith had asked. Standing between Black’s forelegs in the shade her proud profile cut against the desert sun, Shiro could not come up with a single thing to say.

* * *

 

“So what was I like?” Keith asks.

He’s perched on the kitchen counter now, boots swinging against the drawers mounted under it, while Hunk is too preoccupied to tell him off. Shiro watches from the other side of the kitchenette as Hunk carefully cuts out sugar cookies in the shapes of stars and moons while the countertop oven preheats to four hundred degrees. When the kitchenette doesn’t have an oven, an engineer makes do.

From the two bean bags that Lance and Pidge have dragged into the small space, the only response to Keith’s question are the sounds of video game explosions and keyboard strokes.

“You wer— are loyal to a fault,” Shiro says. “You’re an amazing pilot. You protect others and you constantly put your life on the line to protect things that you love. And you’re driven. When you put your mind to it, you’re capable of making the almost impossible happen. Something about your dry sense of humor never fails to make me laugh, and you’re easy to talk to.”

By the time Shiro finishes speaking, the kitchenette has descended into completely silence.

The first sound to break the heavy quiet is the ding of the a countertop oven going off. As Hunk slides a dozen cookies into the oven, Lance lets out an indignant squawk.

“Are you kidding me? Are we even talking about the same Keith?” Lance points an accusing finger at Keith who hops off the counter nonchalantly and goes to sit across from Shiro at the tiny formica table in the corner. Their knees knock when Keith scoots the chair forward, but Shiro doesn’t move away.

Lance emphasizes his point by stabbing his finger, which has followed Keith’s trajectory from counter to table, at the man in question once again. “This man has the social skills of a robot raised an underground rainforest lake!”

“How can a rainforest grow underground if there’s no light?” Pidge asks.

“Is it a rainforest or a lake? Or a lake in a rainforest?” Hunk asks. “Hmm, I guess a rainforest could grow where a lake used to be.”

Shiro can’t bring himself to speak while he looks across the table and Keith gifts him with the same small smile from earlier, a smile that Shiro is starting to feel strangely proprietary about, and Shiro blushes even though he can’t bear to name why that is so.

* * *

 

Krolia and Shiro sat in the hangar bay, one of the few that escaped destruction during the Galra invasion, sharing a cup of instant coffee.

“So he only remembers you and me,” Krolia said.

“The way Allura described it,” Shiro said. “The amount of refined quintessence that exploded caused a concussive blast on more than just the physical plane.”

* * *

 

That night, Shiro dreams of cool hands on his neck, pushing him slowly onto a bed, guiding his face into a kiss that tastes like blueberries. The kiss is sweet but when it ends, Shiro licks his lips and a tartness sits on the tip of his tongue like a bitter reminder of another time.

The cool hands move down to his chest, cupping his ribs like they’re cradling something precious between the span of their grasp.

The lips move down to his neck and press hard teeth into the surface of his skin.

 _I love you i love you i lovey-o-u iloveyo-u iloveyou_ those lips say against his skin. Shiro can’t hear anything, but he can feel the words sink into him, flow through his blood until they reach his heart, trickle through the organ one ventricle at a time while he feels strangely vulnerable even though nothing is holding him down except for the gentle touch of those cold, cold hands.

The thought of returning the sentiment, opening his mouth and letting the words fall from his lips, turns his mouth blue. He can’t do it. His tongue is frozen by ice, the crystalline structure of it like quartz or diamonds, stronger than anything else in his warm heart that beats the rhythm of the reply into his lungs so he can only sigh the essence of it into the kiss over and over again.

* * *

 

Pidge has taken Shiro’s arm for maintenance, so Shiro decides to give himself the day off. If his artificial arm can take a day off, why can’t he? He decides to spend the morning sitting at the base of one of Black’s massive paws to watch Krolia and Keith spar.

They’ve set the boundaries of their makeshift battlegrounds as the length of Black’s flank, and Shiro could swear that he sees a flash of amusement in the curve of her Mona Lisa smile when Keith and Krolia finally agree to the exact perimeter.

It’s too hot to fight in the direct sun even now, but being outside is still infinitely better than dealing with all the curious eyes inside of the remaining Garrison buildings. The most stable buildings are packed with people, both Garrison members and displaced civilians alike, and they are all curious to catch a glimpse of the intergalactic warriors that the Paladins of Voltron are supposed to be.

There are some days when Shiro feels less like a grown man who has commanded powers the likes of which the average human being could only dream of, and more like the boy he had been when he first submitted his application to the Galaxy Garrison. He had dreamed of seeing the stars up close, with no atmosphere between him and their unforgiving light, but now he had touched the very edge of existence and sipped from the well of Death itself, the appeal of space had been drastically reduced. More accurately, the appeal of inhabiting his body in space had disappeared. He no longer wanted to experience space this way, but he still longed to go and leave Earth behind.

Krolia and Keith both fight with an otherworldly grace. There’s nothing about Terran about their combat style. Keith is broader than his mother, but he is also shorter, and Krolia’s whipcord strength is masked by the lightness of her steps, which barely displace the sand dusted across the sandstone mesa like powdered sugar on pancakes.

Krolia swings her luxite blade at Keith’s face and when he ducked, Krolia is already using the momentum from her initial swing to spin around to try and knee him in the face while he’s down.

“If your fight is long, then you’re doing it wrong,” Krolia says as Keith taps out.

“Did you come up with that yourself?”

“It’s an ancient Blades of Marmora proverb, Keith.”

“Well, I don’t remember it.”

Krolia laughs and helps him up from his knees so that they can start again.

The fact that Keith doesn’t even know himself, can only remember Shiro and Krolia out of all the people he has known in space and on Earth, it makes a man wonder, but Shiro is too afraid to give voice to any of his thoughts. That would be making them too real.

He spends the rest of the morning sitting in the shade alternating between watching Keith and Krolia spar and reading the report Iverson had compiled for him about what had happened on Earth since Shiro had left for Kerberos. It’s only when Keith goes to grab his water flask from where he left it in Black’s cockpit that Krolia finally lets her expression crumple.

“I just got him back,” she says to Shiro. Her lips barely move, and her voice is no more than a whisper, but Shiro still hears her loud and clear. He offers her the chocolate bar in its insulated pouch he’d been hiding in a hip pocket for trying times.

* * *

 

Shiro’s arm explodes on a beautiful Monday afternoon.

The skies were a clear, cloudless blue and the temperatures ranged from high eighties to mid-nineties. Humidity was low and the UV index was high and Mercury had just exited retrograde when the Altean crystal in Shiro’s new arm gives one last valiant stutter and gives out.

“Well, fuck,” Pidge says eloquently as she crawls out from behind an upended tool compartment.

Lance waves his arm from behind a storage crate and then gives a thumbs up.

Keith is laying slumped against a wall looking like he’d been blown clear across the room from the blast. Shiro stands and wobbles over to him. His knees give out when he reaches Keith so that he slides down the wall with the support of his good arm until he’s kneeling close enough to Keith to reach out and touch his face.

“Keith?” Shiro whispers. “Are you okay?”

A sliding door chimes and Hunk stands in the doorway taking in the chaos with eyes the size of saucers, the plate of cookies in his hand nearly forgotten as he gasps, “Pidge, is Shiro’s arm on fire?”

* * *

 

This used to be an officer’s suite, Shiro thinks. A kitchenette, a private bathroom, and an office space all in one? It had all the markings of a high ranking workaholic.

Now, the office space has been converted to a makeshift bedroom and living space for nine with mats spread out haphazardly across the floor like some post-apocalyptic bouncy house.

After everyone had trooped into the infirmary to get checked over for minor abrasions and possible concussions, they were all sent away with gauze for their bigger scrapes and orders for bedrest. While everyone else rushed into the room to grab the best pillows and snag the softest blankets, Shiro hung back with Keith, who was walking through the halls slowly as he dragged his fingertips against the wall.

“I know who I am now,” Keith declares.

They’re just a few steps from the doorway.

Shiro starts to smile. “And who might that be?”

“My name is Keith Kogane. I’m the son of Harris Kogane and Krolia. I’m twenty-two, part human and part Galra and my full time job is the Paladin of the Black Lion. My hobbies include knife fighting, sword fighting, and loving you, Takashi Shirogane.”

Now, Shiro doesn’t want to say the room starts to spin, but he does start to feel a little unsteady on his feet as the sheer weight of what Keith is saying hits him. Keith is brave in ways that Shiro can only imagine being, and as he looks into Keith’s face he can’t help but see the pure certainty that Keith radiates as he waits for Shiro to respond. He’s changed so much from the person Shiro first met. He’s grown in ways that Shiro doesn’t know, cannot know, until he submits himself to that intoxicating touch, until he reaches back across the aching gap between them and opens up to the knowing, opens up to being known as this man who feels like a lesser version of some previous self, but perhaps, is simply a version of who he was always meant to be.

“How do you know?” Shiro says. “That you can love me.”

“Do you trust me?” Keith asks as he draws closer.

His lips are warm when he kisses Shiro. Keith doesn’t taste like fruit, just the unassuming sweetness of sugar cookies, the surprising simplicity of their deliciousness mirrored in the simplicity of the kiss that seems to last forever. It’s a chaste kiss, but Shiro feels a frision of heat run down his spine, same as the ones that had plagued him in the months when Keith had cut his hair for him, the patience in his touch setting something in Shiro spinning and shaking, burning and breaking.

“I love you just because, Shiro. Just because.”

* * *

 

“Did you guys get lost in that one hallway or something?” Lance asks when they finally step into the room.

Shiro ducks down to take off his boots in a vain attempt to hide how red his face is.

“Oh my god, Lance, stop it. You’re embarrassing them,” Pidge says as she fiddles with her data pad. She’s ensconced almost completely in pillowy armor.

In the morning, a robotic voice chanting “Shiro and Keith, sitting a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G” greets them at 0800 sharp.

**Author's Note:**

> for k, for all the best ideas. 
> 
> also i find myself humorous huhuhu


End file.
